Twestival: improving the world with social networks

Andrew Keen talks to the irrepressible 'architect' of Twestival, a fundraiser
with global ambitions.

Rio de Janeiro Photo: GETTY IMAGES

Andrew Keen is @ajkeen on Twitter

2:20PM BST 08 Sep 2009

On the Internet, everything is viral. Last September, Amanda Rose, a Canadian entrepreneur and social media graduate student, organized a “Twestival” (a Twitter-Festival) in London to raise money for charity. Organized in two weeks, the first Twestival attracted 250 people who, having connected via Rose and some of her friends on Twitter, then met in real life in Trafalgar Square to help raise cash for a homeless charity.

“We raised £1,000 and 14 boxes of canned foods,” Rose explained when she spoke to me from Toronto over Skype yesterday.

12 months later and Twestival has, quite literally, gone global. This weekend, 133 cities around the world - from Rio de Janeiro to Toronto to Dubai to Copenhagen – are celebrating Twestivals which all will raise money for local causes. Rose is aiming to raise a collective $400,000 this weekend from what she is calling “Twestival Local” – a not unrealistic target given that the Twestival website attracted over half a million visitors in August and is projecting an additional million visitors this month.

The intensely viral, crowd-sourced nature of social media is the key to the success of Rose’s Twestival. In January, she organized “Twestival Global” – a worldwide Twitter driven initiative on behalf of a single non-profit organization called Charity Water which resulted in 10,000 volunteers around the world raising $250,000 for water projects in Africa. The story got splashed around the world’s media and eight weeks later, Rose – who describes herself on her @amanda Twitter handle as a “Canadian vagabond with suitcase in tow” - went to Ethiopia with the Charity Water team to drill the first clean water well.

It was, of course, Tip O’Neill, the longtime Massachusetts congressman and Speaker of the American House of Representatives who said, famously, that all “politics is local.” But he said this before the invention of real-time social media. Now everything on the Internet is simultaneously global and local. But above all else, everything is viral.

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So viral, indeed, that Rose and her team of volunteers have had to turn away two thirds of the 300 cities who applied to participate in this weekend’s Twestival Local events. Barring groups with a political or religious agenda, Twestival selected cities represented by teams of volunteers wanting to raise money for a credible non-profit local cause.

And it promises to be a remarkable weekend of non-profit fun and entertainment. Promoted heavily on Twitter, each local Twestival group is driving revenue through the sale of tickets to an event taking place 10 -13 September. In Toronto, 500 people have paid to go on a luxury cruise on Lake Ontario. In New York City, there’s a celebrity bowling event followed by nightclub bash. In Little Rock, Arkansas, there’s a reading event at the Clinton Presidential library. In London, there’s a concert at Vinopolis featuring the band The Hours which is raising money for Childline. In Amsterdam, there are Twestivals raising money for six different local charities. In Bogota local Columbians are raising money for an abandoned children’s home, while in Dubai, the cause is a local autism center for kids.

What is remarkable about this weekend’s Twestival events that the itinerant and unpaid Rose has organized the whole thing with a team of a dozen volunteer regional coordinators and a couple of website managers. So just as a tiny Silicon Valley based company like Twitter has revolutionized the media world, so Rose’s minuscule network of activists have organized a global series of charity events utilizing the viral tools of real-time social media.

“What should I call you,” I asked Rose. “Are you Twestival’s founder?”

“Founder sounds stupid,” she answered. “I’d rather be known as the architect.”

The kinetic Rose – who rarely stays in a city for more a month or two - is indeed the architect of a new way of operating in today’s digitally connected global economy. Like Twitter and its ecosystem of real-time start up ventures, Rose seems to continually operate on the fly, throwing out new initiatives and innovations with bewildering speed and urgency.

Thus on top of everything else, Rose plans to introduce “Twestival Project” later this week – a lite and spontaneous version of Twestival Local, which will leverage what she calls “community mobs” to organize hyper-local events for the public good. This initiative will be built around a Ning social media site which will act as the networking enabler of these micro local initiatives.

Rose’s 12 month journey from raising 14 boxes of canned foods in Trafalgar Square to architecting this weekend’s orgy of global non-profits reflects the immense potential of real-time social media. The Internet is far from perfect. But the work of the irrepressible Amanda Rose and her real-time global army of Twitter volunteers is an inspiring testament to the vitality of our contemporary wired world.